Ah, this painting has a bit of a story.
I saw this article on Soviet space posters on the BBC. It's short, so take a look. The bottom-line is that as the Soviets wanted to keep their space technology secret, but also demonstrate their accomplishments, they decided that these posters would be their propaganda. I really like the majesty of the posters. They look so good with their clean lines and solid colours, and as I do love space, I couldn't resist creating my own version of these posters to have. I might do another one of these in a bit, maybe the first poster at that link ('In the Name of Peace').
The poster I ended up deciding to copy was this one, awesomely titled: 'Glory of the Space-Heroes, Glory to the Soviet People', from 1963. In particular, it strikes me as so uplifting to have all these people of different walks of life represented on the poster and facing the future together. This is probably not too surprising given the whole Communism thing, but it struck a chord with me.
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| Glory of the Space-Heroes, Glory to the Soviet People |
My idea for my version of the poster was to update it a bit for today's collaborative world. Instead of the red/orange theme, I wanted something a bit more soothing. To replace the image of the USSR, I imagined the entire globe. And instead of Sputnik orbiting the planet, I put in the International Space Station. Now instead of propaganda for the USSR, it has a collaborative spirit of humanity working together and moving forward together.
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| Forward Together! |
This painting took a very long time, and I learned a huge amount from it. This was the first painting where I figured out that I would get a higher quality result from working in layers. While this extends the time taken to finish, (oil paints take FOREVER to dry), it enabled me to do actual layers and get crisp borders.
I think the biggest lesson I learned from the painting was to use linseed oil more (In fact, the subtitle of this painting could be 'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linseed Oil'). For example, I originally did the globe in an undiluted white. But A) this uses way more paint B) it doesn't spread as nicely into the canvas (which is very rough), and C) the thicker paint takes much longer to dry. I learned that if I used a little bit of linseed oil, all these problems would be solved. And you only need a little bit, like 1/3 of the cap of the bottle may be too much. Linseed oil is also absolutely required if you are going to do any precision work, such as on the figures, the outline of the continents, the text, or the orbit lines. It makes the paint more like ink, or watercolours, so you can effectively use the brush like a pen.
The first version of the orbit lines in particular were terrible, as I didn't use any linseed oil. I had to recover the globe and do it again. In fact, I think I redid most sections of this painting two or three times before it looked decent. Which is hard when each time you have to wait the better part of a week for the old stuff to dry.
The other huge lesson from this work is that time planning and sketching will save you time down the road and increase the quality. Taking shortcuts will really hurt the final result. If I did this again, I might do each figure one-at-a-time and use a high-quality version of the continent outline.
This painting is dedicated to Ryan P. He's probably the only person I know who would be super pumped to have a Soviet space propaganda poster.
